The Terminator

Arcep the French regulator has just become the first European regulator to set prices for Wholesale SMS Termination. The rates are €0.03 for Orange and SFR, and €0.035 for Bouygues Telecom. At a typical length of only 190 bytes (incl. protocol overhead), this equates to €166/MB and €195/MB respecitively – not bad business if you can get it. I expect to see the rest of regulators across Europe to rush to regulate this market after all every government in the Western World is desperate to appeal to tomorrow’s voters and nothing eats a youngsters wallet than the cost of texting.

OPTA, the Dutch regulator has just taken a chainsaw to their voice termination rates cutting them from the current 11 euro cents to 5.5 euro cents in July 2008 for KPN and Vodafone, and from 12.4 euro cents to 7.09 euro cents for Orange and T-Mobile. Ouch…

For reference purposes here are the current UK Termination Rates:

It hardly surprising that Vodafone are giving away 3G handsets especially to on-the-road Salesmen, who receive tons of calls during the day.

It is interested that the cost to terminate a 3G call is approx. 50x that of a fixed call.